Organizing authority in the climate change debate: IPCC controversies and the management of dialectical tensions

A.J. Porter, Timothy Kuhn, Brigitte Nerlich

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

At the centre of the undeniably contentious debates about climate change lies the question of authority: Which voices will be heard and, thus, who will influence policy, activism, and scientific inquiry? Following high-profile errors found in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Dutch Parliament sought to achieve ‘balance’ in these debates by bringing together climate scientists and skeptics for a set of online discussions. Using both communication and dialectical theorizing, we explore the organizing of authority around climate change in the Netherlands. We locate dialectical tensions and discursive positions of diverse actors in the debate, examining the communication practices by which actors sought to resolve tensions as part of three authoritative moves: bridging, (de)coupling, and resisting. The combination of these authoritative moves failed to engage with – and therefore could not resolve – the sources of the underlying dialectical tensions. We build on these insights to suggest contributions to the climate change debate and theory on authority in organization studies.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberhttps://doi.org/10.1177/0170840617707999
Pages (from-to)873-898
Number of pages26
JournalOrganization Studies
Volume39
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Funding

The first author gratefully acknowledges funding provided by the NWO, Netherlands Scientific Organization, grant number NWO-ORA 464-10-077, for a project led by Dr. Iina Hellsten (VU University, Amsterdam). The third author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Leverhulme Trust (RP2011-SP-013). The authors declare no conflict of interest with regard to this research. The first author also thanks Pieter Roodenrijs for his assistance in collecting the data on which this article is based.

FundersFunder number
Netherlands Scientific OrganizationNWO-ORA 464-10-077
Leverhulme TrustRP2011-SP-013

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